Building Capacity for AI and The New Business Landscape
Do you remember when you could walk into a company, office, factory, or local business and ask for a job? Yeah, neither do I. The continuous improvements made to our technology have required workers to become more specialized, more educated, and less flexible. Now everyone wants experienced people for their entry level roles. Competition is getting more fierce than ever as the job market is facing a great paradox. What do you do when technology is advancing so fast that modern society doesn't realize it is at the crossroads between a great age and a dire one? These kinds of questions have vastly different answers based on perspective, the corporate, societal, and individual. We will explore these perspectives and more as part of a greater weekly series called, "The New Business Landscape"
AI is Here, and it is Terrifyingly Beautiful
While the small group of collective geniuses at companies like OpenAI bless the world with GPT-4 and ChatGPT, it is imperative for everyone to understand something vitally important. If you are active in the workforce either as a CEO or as an entry level engineer, you need to be using AI. Whether you work in the trenches on technical problems, or run an HR group, you need to be using AI. Whether you are a client, consultant, or project manager, you need to be using AI. The amount of productivity these tools have allowed for in their short implementation time has been dramatic and immense.
The immediate uses are obvious, a quick prompt and you get a strong basis or outline for an idea. The tools have a level of alignment to make them answer you in as human a way as can be reasonably achieved. AI in this capacity is going to be incredible for the short and medium term corporate landscape.
There will be a number of industries and corporate divisions that will experience these disruptions in the short term. First, if you work in customer service you better watch out. You're likely to be replaced with an AI by 2026, if not sooner. The benefits of using an AI for Customer Service seem like a no-brainer. It has access and capability to handle all user needs, at scale, without delay, and without the pressure of an unsatisfied customer. What a great tool this will be for companies to use to manage the bulk of their customer service needs, ultimately improving their profitability.
Unfortunately, we are talking about major disruptions to the workforce as it pertains to customer service. And it seems this is the great fear that people have around AI generally. Firstly, that AI can replace their jobs and secondly, that a mass replacement of workers with AI would have massive societal impact and likely require a great deal of governmental regulation to ensure societal stability.
While I won't speculate on the nature of the government regulation, we need to understand that the market often acts much faster than the regulators do. This argument can be made for another sector, that of self-driving trucks and vehicles.
As we still face the supply chain ripples of the COVID tsunami, trucking has been majorly impacted. It would be fantastic if we had self-driving trucks that don't stop, sleep, or rest. However, truck driving is the largest employment field for high school educated men in the United States. While the utopian idea of self driving vehicles is an ideal, the implementation is likely to lead to a dystopian outcome. That is why we stress project implementation fundamentals at MKI. Even the best and well-intentioned ideas are marred by poor or incomplete implementation that can lead to varying levels of disaster.
The last group the will be affected in the short term may not seem so obvious at first, but it is this type of implementation we are so excited about at MKI.
Procurement. Procurement divisions of companies are now the most critical part of the project execution lifecycle due to the impact one missing part can have on an operation. How will AI replace them? Well, as with any significantly large data set, an AI can be trained on that data to give you active information on the market landscape in your respective field.
Imagine asking a tool "How much will our manufacturing arm have to spend on steel today?" and not only being able to answer that question from a demand perspective, but a price perspective as well. All while never engaging a vendor. The amount of data available at your disposal significantly reduces the burden on Category Management teams and Tactical Buyers. You can align your processes to optimize the data input into the AI so as you carry out your procurement process, you are in parallel improving the algorithm you use to power it.
This idea can be carried into numerous other business domains and we are only scratching the surface of what is possible. We need to use these tools and continue to educate ourselves on The New Business Landscape as the questions that will be posed are far bigger than how can we improve profitability?
Cheers,
Islam Najjar
